16 Places To Get An Education For Free
The Internet isn’t only a venue to look for new and old friends but it’s also an amazing place to teach yourself about certain topics without having to pay anything. With online education, it doesn’t matter where you are. You can sit in a coffee shop or lie down in your bed. In addition, you don’t need to learn what you don’t want to know.
The vast amounts of places, where you can education yourself, are the Internet’s greatest strength. However, there are pros and cons of it. Without a clear strategy, you’ll find yourself misinformed. Worse, you’ll be frustrated.
In order to maximize the benefits of online education, you’ll have to go through various information sources. You also need to evaluate each of them based on their credibility and relevance to what you want to learn. Then, piece them together to form a picture of the truth. That’s how you find a good online education venue.
Out of thousands of sites that you can go to, here are the best places where you can get an education without paying anything.
1. Coursera
This site has more than 300 courses in 20 different categories. All of them are created by universities from 16 countries. In here, you can watch video lectures, complete a graded assessment, take quizzes and interact with your classmates and teachers.
2. Khan Academy
This is a non-profit website that aims to change the way how people learn. The site’s resources can be obtained by anyone, whether you’re a teacher, principal or a student. As a student of this academy, you can use its extensive video library to educate yourself about anything you want to learn. It includes science topics, like chemistry, physics and chemistry. Each video is easy to understand. It also has lectures in math so you can practice solving math problems.
3. Open Courseware Consortium
The educational materials provided here are of high quality made for college and university levels. Each material has planning and evaluation tools to further facilitate students in their course. In here, you can find specific topics that you’re interested in. You can also learn the courses in different languages. The topics provided are aplenty, ranging from thermodynamics to culture to epidemics.
4. MIT Open Courseware
If you’re planning to enroll in Massachusetts Institute of Technology but you’re short on budget, then now is the time for you to learn the MIT way. Just recently, MIT started to open its doors to those who want to learn their courses for free by publishing their course materials online. You can find courses by topic or department. It has a huge collection of audio/video lectures. Courses are translated into different foreign languages, include Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and more.
5. Tufts University
This site has links to educational resources online. With this site, you don’t have to use Google’s search engine to search for a topic. This is especially true if the topic you want to learn is a bit complex and the level of education is more than skin deep. It has courses by school, such as School of Dental Medicine, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, and so on.
6. Alison
Apart from English, it has courses in French and German. It covers everything from health to SAT prep to American copyright law.
7. Academic Earth
It has online courses from top universities in the world, such as California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and so on.
8. Open Yale Courses
It has a selection of courses that are being taught at Yale University. In here, you’re learning topics the Yale way.
9. Open Culture
This site has a large collection of downloadable courses. You can also get free certificate courses, movies, eBooks, textbooks, language lessons, and more. Its free courses will include biology, computer science, engineering, and so on.
10. Open Courses
It houses more than 10,000 free courses and it features some of the great universities in the world, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University.
11. Berkeley
It’s designed for learners and students around the world. You can view courses by semesters or departments.
12. Open Learning Initiative
It’s made by Carnegie Mellon University for students who want to access its courses.
13. Ted Talks
It has different types of topics. It includes thousands of videos on various subjects.
14. UC San Diego
It’s a podcasting service of UCSD. Although it’s made for the university’s students, anyone can download and listen to the lectures.
15. Ignite
This is a great place to learn something new each day. Each speaker has five minutes to share his/her views about a certain topic.
16. Project Gutenberg
It’s one of the first sites that allow visitors to download eBooks for free. Right now, it houses more than 4,200 fee eBooks that tackle a wide range of topics including non-fiction, literature and historic documents.
These places won’t only teach you something. They also encourage you to share what you’ve learned. In this way, you’ll be able to apply what you’ve learned from the courses available. Once you get the basics, you can use such knowledge in a creative and useful way.
